


Some Assembly Required

by imacashew



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Brain Surgery, Cybernetics, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Medical Procedures, Mentions of Medical Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-27 00:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20398492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imacashew/pseuds/imacashew
Summary: “Prosthetics were common on Pandora. Saying you got them because you did some shady things for Hyperion, were not.”Rhys and his cybernetics.





	Some Assembly Required

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, geez. It’s been a while since I’ve written anything Tales related, but I started a new playthrough of it. 
> 
> I just got thinking about Rhys’ cybernetics and prosthetics on Pandora and it turned into this. 
> 
> Someday, I’ll get back into “Rebuild.” It’s not abandoned, but I needed to step back and figure out what I was doing with it.

If Rhys was being completely honest with himself (and he often wasn’t), he’d say that he remembered bits and pieces of when his cybernetics were installed. 

If others asked him, he’d lie and say that he was knocked out the entire time. That the Hyperion anesthetics were _ that good _. 

When he wandered Pandora, he’d come up with cool stories about why he needed the robotic arm, ECHO eye, and temple port. 

A skag got him. A traumatic event back in college. He had a disease that made him replace body parts with metal. Anything to cover the fact he chose to become a cyborg of his own free will.

Prosthetics were common on Pandora. Saying you got them because you did some shady things for Hyperion, were not. 

He wasn’t sure why he was embarrassed now. He never was before. 

Some days, he thought it was cool. To hack into anything with a few wiggles of his fingers. To find out what anything was with a simple glance. To become one with the interface as hackers of his caliber always wanted to do.

Other days were harder. When the human and metal parts in his head didn’t get along, causing debilitating migraines. When the meeting of flesh and natural nerves misfired, causing fiery pain in his shoulder and neck. The burning pain of a phantom limb that was removed as he slept. 

He tried to think about the cool days. 

* * *

The thing was, these types of body modifications were common on Helios.

Everyone knew of Handsome Jack’s Enforcer, Wilhelm, who was addicted to changing every limb and living part of himself to cold, mechanical parts. 

Someone always knew someone in their department who replaced a finger or eye with cybernetics. It was how things went.

When Hyperion came out with the new Data-Slicer, no one batted an eye at the highly questionable, morally ambiguous elective surgery. 

That’s just what Hyperion did.

Not a lot of people committed to it, of course. It was expensive. Came with a complication and side-effect list that was thirty pages long. Worked in conjunction with the ECHO eye and data drive implants that were attached to the brain. Usually limited to the coding, programming, and data-mining departments.

Rhys personally didn’t think about it until he had finally closed the eridium deal that he and Vaughn devised to get him promoted. He got the bonus and leg up he wanted, but he and his friends wanted to go farther. Better. Higher. 

And if it cost an arm to get to the top, so be it.

* * *

As with most surgeries, there was a pre-op visit with the doctors. 

He had brought Vaughn, who volunteered to keep an eye on him while he recovered, as moral support. Despite initial objections to the cybernetics, his buddy was considerably easy to convince later on. 

He vaguely remembered signing several hundred forms that gave the doctors and engineers to do what they had to do. 

(He tried to read through all of them, but saw something about nerve death, brain death, and death death and decided that maybe he shouldn’t even bother reading everything in print. That was his first mistake.)

He tried to ignore the churn in his gut as the doctor discussed opening his skull to install the wires and port in his brain. He swallowed the bile in his throat as the doctor explained how he was to be awake during parts of it. 

The doctor had the pre-testing scan of his head on the screen, showing how deep the port would go. Showing where the wires would cross through to connect to his ECHO-eye like high-tech computer hardware. 

There was a part of him that quietly called out to reconsider. To reevaluate every bad decision he came up with at this point. 

He signed away his arm, brain, and more parts of his humanity.

* * *

They started with the neural port and eye. 

He remembered being awake, but devoid of pain. He remembered, clear as day, the pressure on his head as medical techs asked him about Hyperion, his job, where he went to school.

He let them root around in his head, poking at the grey matter, unaware as he talked about majoring in computer and data science. About how Vaughn followed him to college and Hyperion and wherever next. How he admired Handsome Jack’s position and wanted to be at the top too someday. 

It took twelve hours. 

Afterward, as he laid in an H! branded hospital bed and bandages wrapped around his head and eye covered with a patch, they prepared him for the amputation of his right arm. 

Vaughn talked to him about the assholes in the accounting department as they worked around him, administering pain medication and anesthetics to his veins. 

He gave his bro a weak fist bump with his flesh, bone, and blood right hand for the last time before they pushed him through the double doors to the operating theater. 

When he woke another twelve hours later after they grafted wires to his nerves and metal to his bones, he gave a weak smile at the yellow marvel of Hyperion engineering. 

Go big or go home.

* * *

Years later, after a crazy adventure on Pandora with an AI of his murderous boss in his head, he knew he didn’t think as he pulled each piece of Hyperion cybernetics from his body. 

As he impaled the marvelous, yellow machinery on a spike, he didn’t think of the twelve hours he spent on a table as they grafted the port to his shoulder and nerves. Didn’t think of the doctors reinforcing his spine and ribs to accommodate the extra weight. 

As he took a dirty, jagged piece of glass to his temple, he didn’t think of the hours he spent awake as the doctors dug into his brain. Didn’t think of delicate wires that went through his head, connecting everything to his eye. 

As the AI begged on his knees and raised the bloody shard to his eye, he didn’t think about how the eye and port were connected and how removing all of that may have ruined his motor functions for life. 

He didn’t want to think about how broken he’d be at the end and how much needed to be rebuilt. 

Of his body and himself. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr @cashew-butter or @cashewwritesstuff!


End file.
